By providing ready access to all these types of occurrence data,
Calflora seeks
to facilitate research on questions related to biodiversity, ecology,
and conservation, and help researchers get the full benefit of geographic
analysis and modeling tools.

Access to Data

Use
Observation Hotline
to search for observations and view them on a map.
This application will show photos attached to individual
observations when available.

Use
Plant Distribution
to see the extent of a particular plant.
This application will show lines and polygons
attached to individual observations when available.

Use
What Grows Here?
to view all plants at a particular location.
This application can show the distributions of
several plants on a map at the same time.

The intent is to provide a core set of data about each
observation and enough information for the user to select only those records
that are suitable for their purpose.
When possible, links are provided to the
data source for additional information.
When we receive bulk data sets, we examine them to extract:

a plant name, a location, and a date

basic information about the site if available

the source institution and individuals responsible for the observation

the method used by the
observer or collector to identify this observation

Individual contributors answer these same questions by
filling out a form, either in a smart phone application or
in a
web application.

Quality Control

When you see an observation of a plant at a certain
location on Calflora, does it mean that the
plant is (was) really there?
Because Calflora collects data from diverse sources,
each with their own strengths and weaknesses,
there is some filtering of the data which you (the user) must do
to make the best use of this data.

Here are some error conditions to watch out for:

the plant is erroneously identified

the record is incorrectly georeferenced (eg. the coordinates are not in the stated county)

the observer or collector did not realize that
the plant in question was actually cultivated

Whenever possible, we try to identify such records
and to label them as suspect.
This is an ongoing task as new data continues to
come in. Meanwhile, here are several strategies for determining
the level of evidence for a plant at a location:

1.
The presence of a plant in an area will be
reinforced by other nearby observations of the same plant.
Look at the number of records for a particular plant
in a particular area. As the observation database grows larger,
this becomes an increasingly effective technique.
For instance, if you see that there is only a single
record for a particular plant in the area of interest,
and it is far away from other observations of the
same plant,
you may choose to discount it.
Some Calflora web applications are set up to enable this kind of filtering:

From the map on a
Taxon Report page you can quickly get an idea of
how many records there are of the plant in a county or part of a county.

In the What Grows Here?
application, if you set "Minimum Record Count" to two
or more, you will eliminate singleton plant records from the plant list
for the target area.

2.
Pay attention to the individual observers
and collectors responsible for a record.
Some are more reliable at plant identification than others.

All that said, if you see a plant observation on Calflora
that looks like it has a problem, you can put a comment on
the record explaining what is wrong.
(We do pay attention to comments!)
To add a comment to a record, make sure you are registered
as a contributor and signed into Calflora, then go to the
DETAIL
page for the record.
Open COMMENTS, then click ADD A COMMENT,
then enter your comment and press SUBMIT.

Scientific Name Changes

Calflora preserves the scientific name chosen by the contributor.
A contributor can change the scientific name on a record
at any time, but Calflora does not automatically change
scientific names.
If a scientific name changes, and the change in unambiguous
(for instance, from Rhamnus californica to
Frangula californica in 2012),
Calflora will keep the old name, but make it resolve to
the new name.

As an example, here is the
DETAIL PAGE for a record that Michael O'Brien contributed in 2010.
He chose the scientific name Rhamnus californica.
When the record was first entered, Rhamnus californica
was an accepted name, and so clicking on the Rhamnus californica
link went to the Taxon Report page for Rhamnus californica.
Currently, clicking on the Rhamnus californica link
goes to the Taxon Report page for Frangula californica
(which shows Rhamnus californica as a synonym or alternate name).

On Location Quality

When Calflora started out, there was very little
observation data available. We took whatever we could get,
just to be able to sketch out in rough terms where
the various plants grew.
Some of this original location data was erroneous, and
has since been removed. Some of it was accurate
but not very precise. For instance,
a checklist of plants for Fort Hunter-Ligett:
the presence of a plant on this list indicates that
the plant is growing somewhere (or maybe in more than one place)
in an area of 167,000 acres (67 thousand hectares or 670 million square meters).

Current tense,
when Trimbles, smart phones, and other GPS enhanced devices
are used to make observations, the device typically produces
an error radius interpreted as the accuracy of the
device at the moment the observation was made.
If an observation arrives with an error radius of 2 meters,
it indicates that the plant was growing somewhere in an
area of 12.5 square meters around the given coordinates.

Some specimen records from the Consortium of California
Herbaria were georeferenced after the fact (eg. from
written location descriptions), and are assigned a large
error radius.
If an observation arrives with an error radius of 2 miles,
it indicates that the plant was growing somewhere in an
area of 12.5 square miles (8,000 acres) around the given coordinates.

In order to integrate these various record types,
Calflora classifies the quality of location data in several levels
as follows.

Radius (meters)

Area (square meters)

Area (acres)

Quality

1

≤ 5.6

≤ 100

≤ 0.025

HIGH

2

≤ 44

≤ 6,000

≤ 1.5

3

≤ 76

≤ 18,000

≤ 4.5

4

≤ 139

≤ 60,000

≤ 15

MEDIUM

5

≤ 489

≤ 750,000

≤ 185

6

≤ 798

≤ 2,000,000

≤ 494

LOW

7

≤ 3090

≤ 30,000,000

≤ 7,413

8

> 3090

> 30,000,000

> 7,413

Location Quality
(HIGH, MEDIUM, LOW) is available as a selection criteria in the
What Grows Here? application.
Internally, Calflora uses these quality levels for various purposes.
One purpose is
to select which points are appropriate to use for
making climate and soil profiles,
according to the resolution of the available climate and soil map layers.
(If the accuracy is better than
15 acres (6,000 square meters), the point is usable for a soil profile. If the
accuracy is better than 185 acres (750,000 square meters), the point is usable
for a climate profile.)